YMMV / Age of Empires II

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In the Barbarossa campaign's last scenario, The Emperor Sleeping, after fighting your way through Damascus and the Saracen's camp, all spawning powerful units at will, you end up in a fortified but soldierless Jerusalem.

In the vanilla version, Mangonels/Onagers will not stop to attack an enemy unit within their line of sight if one of your other units can be damaged.

If you don't set your units to "Defensive" or "Keep Terrain" mode, you'll often find later that they have broken formation and spread all over the map running after a random scout, if not gotten killed.

Better Than Canon: An extensive community exists towards creating custom campaigns using the in game scenario editor, to say that some of these have such effort and commitment put into them as to shame the official campaigns as released is an understatement. They can be found here[1].

Casual/Competitive Conflict: Competitive players tend to ignore anything beyond The Conquerors. The most common reasons being performance bugs on multiplayer in the HD versions and many changes that disrupts the well-established metagame for said expansion such as several Tier-Induced Scrappy civilizations (both high-end and low-end of the trope) introduced in Forgotten Empires/The Forgotten and The African Kingdoms.

The very popular Castle Blood Arena (CBA), there are only 5 non-faction specific units worth producing in late game. Arbalests, Heavy Cavalry Archers, Hand Cannoneers, Paladins, and Heavy Camels. Although Pikeman/Halberdiers can be situationally useful if fighting the Persians. The only reason to produce anything else is if you can't build any of those 5 units.

Knight rushes are very popular since they are Lightning Bruisers and can be trained as soon as players hit the Castle Age while their counters need to be upgraded first before they can even stand a chance against them. However, civilizations that lack Bloodlines (+20 HP for cavalry) will find this strategy to be less appealing.

The final scenario for the tutorial campaign (the Battle of Falkirk) portrays it as a siege, and implies that William Wallace survives to continue his war with the English. While they were probably trying to avoid the historical Downer Ending, they could've just as easily given Wallace a Heroic Sacrifice.

The Battle of Falkirk should have had you playing as the English where you have to defeat William Wallace. It also should have been the second-to-last mission of the Tutorial campaign. The real final tutorial mission should have been the Battle of Bannockburn, where it reveals that the narrator of the tutorial campaign was Robert the Bruce.

In The Conquerors:

The religious building for the Mesoamericans are still called Monasteries, and the religious unit is still called "Monk". However, their monk actually uses a different skin than other monks, making them look like a Mayincatec priest. At least they got the blood on the stairs.

The Montezuma campaign repeats the popular myth that the Aztecs mistook the Spanish for gods.

In the El Cid campaign, El Cid was said to have been killed by an arrow and propped up on a horse in order to stop the truth from spreading. In reality, he died peacefully. This was probably done for the same or similar reasons as the Battle of Falkirk bit.

Ensemble Darkhorse: For a very minor role in the first Genghis Khan level, Ornlu has gotten quite poular among the fanbase, enough for the developers to reference him in Age Of Mythology and Age of Empires III.

The Huns in The Conquerors don't require houses like everyone else. This means that, in Deathmatch (when you start with a huge stockpile of resources), the tactic of "Build a few Barracks, spam-click build Militia Button, and swarm everyone" ends up being this. Even in normal games this bonus ended up very powerful due to this game's wood-reliant economy. Unlike the Aztecs and Vikings, whose equally great bonuses are hindered by their infantry focus (yet they don't even get Halberdiers, a powerful Anti-Cavalry unit) the Huns have faster-producing Stables, fully-upgraded Paladins and the cheapest Cavalry Archers in the game to dispose most unit compositions. They are lacking in late-game sieging and their unique unit is less impressive Paladins but for the most of the game they are lethally viable.

The Mayans enjoy being in the top tiers despite their limited options due to their broken economic bonus (resources last 20% longer) and the ability to swarm the enemy with their El Dorado-boosted Eagle Warriors as well as cheap and durable Plumed Archers with those resources. The latter even has similar stats to Cavalry Archers, making them perfect for raiding enemy villagers.

The Vikings on water maps. Cheaper Docks and warships along with a strong economy makes them able to mass warships before everybody else can.

The Goths' ability to Zerg Rush. They get two unique techs, one that lets them build their unique unit, the Huskarl, at Barracks note Instead of Castles (like most Unique Units) and the heavy investments in Stone, villagers, and build-time that Castles require. Barracks can be produced quickly with cheap materials and only 1 or 2 villagers, and another that massively boosts the speed at which Barracks produce units. Combine those with the rather hefty Conscription boost (further reduction of build-time for units) and several Barracks, and you've got hordes of Huskarls, which are designed to tank arrows, and get an attack bonus vs. buildings. This results in an army that can shrug off towers, town centers, and even castles — and is replenished at lightning speed.

The eventually patched-out Teuton Town Center range boost, which allowed the Teutons to completely lock down an enemy civilization by deleting their own Town Center and rebuilding it just out of range of the opposition's Town Center.

The Persians' War Elephants; they're slow, but so powerful that outside of units they're specifically weak against (monks, pikemen, siege weapons, which any reasonable army will have ways of dealing with), they're virtually unstoppable.

The various Korean onager bonuses allow them to outrange near enough anything and the onager's obscene firepower and area of effect damage means they will cause insane damage before anything can retaliate.

The Korean war wagons also count, though seeming unlikely at first. Building one war wagon is a waste: expensive, slower and less range than a cavalry archer, doesn't make as clear damage as one or a scorpion and is easily overrun by a cavalry charge and destroyed. But mass enough war wagons, fully upgraded, combine them with onagers and no enemy units will be able to make a dent on them.

British Longbowmen, once fully upgraded, can outrange any Castle except for a Teutonic Castle (a Castle's maximum range is 10-11 depending on the civilisation, the fully upgraded British Longbowman has 12 range, Teuton castles have 13). They can outrange any siege unit except for Bombard Cannons and Trebuchets (Trebuchets are damn slow and can't hit moving targets very well, Bombard Cannons barely manage to outrange British Longbowmen, are slower and not everyone can make them); they can even match, if not outrange, the aforementioned Korean Siege Onager. Suppose they are near the sea, and the enemy decides to use their navy to destroy the Longbowmen? Well, the Longbowmen can outrange any ship (except for the Cannon Galleon, which is also pretty damn inaccurate (unless you're Spanish). They don't even need to worry about cavalry, because large numbers of them can shoot down entire hordes before they can do any serious damage.

The Spanish in late game seem to excel at practically everything, with no flaws in infantry, ships, cavalry, monks and fortifications, and bonuses on gunpowder, trade, blacksmith technologies and villager attack. They even get two unique units: the only gunpowder cavalry unit and the only monk cavalry unit in the game. They have bad archers that make them weak in the early game, but if you let them get to the Castle Age and beyond you'll get screwed. Guaranteed.

The Slavic unique unit, the Boyar, is basically a super-heavy cavalry unit, having the attack of a Paladin and humongous melee armor, along with respectable pierce armor. A swarm of maxed-out Elite Boyars is virtually unstoppable; they can even go toe-to-toe with explicitly anti-cavalry units and come out on top.

Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Age of Empires II has gotten some popularity in mainland China to the point there is actually a larger competitive scene than Europe and America. note Which is quite ironic since a lot of Age of Empires II fans in the west have used the Chinese tech tree of lacking gunpowder units and block printing as an example of blatant historical inaccuracy of the game

In the fourth Attila the Hun mission, you are tasked with destroying three major cities. Destroying the third spawns the massive Roman Army, a force of over a hundred top-tier units...unless you found and killed the placeholder unit on the map, which causes the army to be instantly defeated.

In the fifth Saladin mission, Jihad!, one of the three cities, Ascalon, is intended to attempt a Wonder victory. However, sometimes the AI for Ascalon bugs out and doesn't do anything. Given as how Jihad! is That One Level even without Ascalon going for the Wonder, this is immensely helpful.

The in game scenario editor can do some interesting things with structures and terrain elements that shouldn't be possible. This has been abused thoroughly by the modding community creating custom campaigns.

In the first scenario of the Attila the Hun campaign, it's possible to fire both the "Bleda getting killed in the boar hunt" and the "Attila fleeing the Hun camp" events if your timing is good. Because of the first event, the Huns will argue over whether Attila is a worthy leader or an honorless cur, but the second event will make all Hun units instantly join your side upon Bleda's death. This has the practical benefit of giving you Bleda's entire faction with minimal bloodshed, as well as being hilarious to watch.

Another bug in the first Attila the Hun scenario can occur if the player allies with the Scythians. While the Scythians will break their alliance with the Persians, the Persians don't always do the same and won't even bother to fight back as the Scythians slaughter their way through their base.

It's the Same, Now It Sucks: While the Middle Eastern architecture set suits the Berbers, there's still the issue that 6 civs share the same set (Saracens, Turks, Persians, Byzantines, Indians and the aforementioned Berbers).

Memetic Loser: While still a decent civ, the Chinese are often mocked for not having Hand Cannoneers and Bombard Cannons despite being credited for inventing gunpowder in real life. Some people even forget that they have access to Bombard Towers and Cannon Galleons because of this in addition their unique technology, "Rocketry" (although it only boosts the damage for Chu Ko Nus and Scorpions only). Some speculated that this is for gameplay balance purposes, as they are supposed to function as the Jack-of-All-Trades civilization.

Camels are usually avoided because they cost a lot of gold yet are very frail. They die easily to building fire as they're classified as ships (which have a similar weakness) to differentiate themselves from Knights. This is one of the reasons why the Indians cannot utilize their camels prior to The African Kingdoms because their Knight line (one of the most powerful standard units in the Castle Age) is completely replaced by Camels, which due to the reasons above above cannot be used similarly to Knights.

Scorpions. They're essentially giant crossbows on wheels that fire penetrating bolts that pass through enemies, and thus can hit a whole line of enemies all at once. What's the issue? Their damage. In the original game, they had a base damage of 7, which gets reduced by pierce armor, meaning pretty much anything with upgraded armor can reduce it to Scratch Damage. Their dismal range, low mobility and poor health didn't help. Upgrading them to Heavy Scorpions, however, did give them a somewhat more respectable base damage of 16, and the later expansions raised their base damage to 12, making them at least somewhat situationally useful.

Koreans, Saracens and Turks in open maps. All three of them have poor early-game and open maps make them susceptible to being rushed. This is inverted in closed maps (e.g. Black Forest) where they dominate due to the nature of the map itself and they have access to many strong Imperial Age units and technology.

Infantry Unique Units mostly range between extremely situational to completely useless with a few exceptions, but among civs that get them the Franks got it the worst. Despite being billed as the "Cavalry" civilization their only relevant cavalry bonus is extra HP for Knights (which becomes insignificant when many other civs get Bloodlines; which affects all mounted units). Their Unique Unit the Throwing Axeman is regarded as one of the worst as it is easily countered, has the strength of a Long Swordsman even when fully upgraded, short ranged and ended up slower than most infantry due to them lacking Squires. They also got overshadowed by other civilizations with better cavalry and bonuses such as the Spanish, Persians, Huns, Magyars and Berbers. The Forgotten noticed this and buffed the Franks by making their foragers work faster, gave them Squires and most importantly a Unique Tech in Castle Age that makes their Stables produce cavalry faster. However, the Power Creep induced by The African Kingdoms civs makes them fall back to this again.

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